There was a time fifty years ago and more when science
fiction was a disreputable and marginal literature.
Although it presented itself as foreseeing scientific
process to come, the stories that it actually told were
more likely to be about wild adventures on Venus or Mars,
or the vulnerability of humanity to cosmic catastrophe,
or our evolutionary inferiority to cool, brainy and
pitiless invaders or successors.

These fantastic and unsettling visions weren't
published in respectable hardcover books. They appeared
only in a handful of cheap rough-papered gaudily-covered
magazines which were all but lost amongst racks and racks
of pulp story magazines of every kind. In those days
before TV and paperback books, these pulp magazines,
issued every other month or every month or even more
often, were a major source of popular entertainment.

For the most part, pulp fiction was hastily written
and poorly paid. It was held in low esteem by the
cultural establishment of the day. And science fiction
may have been the pulp form that was most despised. It
was thought of as crude, unrealistic, and weird - and
much of it was.

And yet, if today classic science fiction books can be
published in leather-bound, gilt edged, illustrated
editions with respectful introductions, it is primarily
because of the intellectual and imaginal foundation that
was laid down during those days of pulpish obscurity. One
man in particular is responsible for this - John W.
Campbell, Jr., a leading SF writer in the pulps of the
Thirties who became editor of Astounding Stories in
September 1937.

With only few and partial exceptions, science fiction
as Campbell had first come to it as a writer had been
simple, boyish, scientific wish-fulfillment stories,
half-fascinated but also more than half-paralyzed by
apprehensions of future doom. Under Campbell's influence
as editor of Astounding (and Unknown, a short-lived
companion magazine devoted to stories of rationalized
fantasy), SF would take on focus, breadth, and rigor that
it had never had before. It became a wondrous modern myth
in which men wit a flexible and capacious command of
scientific knowledge, who were willing to learn, to
overcome their limitations and solve the problems they
encountered, and to assume greater and greater cosmic
responsibility, were imagined as extending the hegemony
of mankind from present-day Earth to the future and to
the stars.

Campbell found many writers who were wager to make
contributions to the envisionment of his Twentieth
Century mythos of potential human scientific power and
achievment - the great fictional Universla Works Project
within whose compass and authority all subsequent SF has
been imagined and written. But five of his authors stand
out, one of them from an older generation, the others new
young writers schooled and groomed by Campbell.

The older writer was E.E. "Doc" Smith. The
other four were L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein,
Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt, the author of Slan.
These five writers, working seperately but with a keen
awareness of each other's accomplishments, scetched out
the imaginal parameters of modern science fiction.

But van Vogt was not quite the same sort of writer as
Smith, de Camp, Heinlein or Asimov - or anyone else. To
properly appreciate van Vogt's difference, let's briefly
look at Campbell's other major mythmakers and their
projects:

"Doc" Smith was a professional food chemist
who wrote SF as a leisure activity. Back in the late
Twenties, his pioneering novel of interstellar travel and
exploration, "The Skylark of Space", had been
the stimulus which first prompted john Campbell to take
up science fiction writing when he was as freshman an
M.I.T. Now, under Campbell's editorship of Astounding, in
four novels serialized between 1937 and 1948, Smith
imagined superior men of the future working in concert
with like beings of other races to defend all sentient
life in our galaxy in an eons-long war between good and
evil. In some ways, these Lensman stories were old
fashioned and pre-Campbellian, but they did exemplify the
scope and command that Campbell wished his new rigorous
SF to attain and thay set a mark of human capability and
moral achievement for his other writers to aim for.

L. Sprague de Camp was a man of immense curiosity and
erudition who had been trained as an aeronautical
engineer but then gotten sidetracked by the Depression
into a series of compromise jobs. His greatest
contribution to Astounding was a series of scientific and
historical articles which expressed Campbell's philosophy
of the potential power of human scientific achievement.
Then, when Campbell started his rational fantasy
magazine, Unknown, de Camp became it's star writer. In a
novel, "Lest Darkness Fall", he imagined a man
of the present travelling to the latter days of the Roman
Empire and giving it a shot of the knowledge necessary to
prevent it's collapse. And in a series of stories written
in collaboration with scholar Fletcher Pratt, he showed
another contemporary hero imposing scientific order on
various alternate universes whose reflection is to be
seen in literature and legend.

Robert Heinlein, an engineering officer who had been
forced into retirement from the navy by tuberculosis
before he was out of his twenties, became Campbell'smost
reliable and innovative writer in Astounding during the
three yearsprior to the entry of the United States into
World War 2. In his Future History series, and in an
accompanying chart published in Astounding in 1941,
Heinlein suggested that the future might be ours to
invent. He envisioned a series of societies to come, each
with it's own nature and concerns, yet historically
connected to each other and also linked to the present
day. And he confirmed this prospect of multiple possible
human futures in stories like "Beyond This
Horizon" and "Waldo" which presented
completely different sequences of potential historical
and social development.

Isaac Asimov was a precocious pre-med student - and
later a chemistry graduate student - at Columbia
University who brought an unsaleable story to Campbell's
office in 1938 and hung around to learn whatever he could
from the editor. After a three-year apprenticeship in
which he sold a fair number of stories to other magazines
but precous few to Campbell, he suddenly blossomed into
one of the editor's most productive contributors. First,
in a series of robot stories, Asimov placed our
heretofore untamed mechanical offspring under the rule of
scientific law. He followed this with a pivotal story,
"Nightfall", in which he presented the power of
science as fundamentally superior to the cycles of
history, previously thought of as all-powerful. Finally,
in his Foundation series, which pictured the decline of
an immense human interstellar empire 50,000 years in the
future as it was offset and counteracted by men with a
command of the new science of psychohistory, Asimov
extended scientific order to the whole galaxy.

A.E. van Vogt, the last of Campbell's great writers,
recognized that he was working on the same overall mythic
project as Smith, de Camp, Heinlein and Asimov. he would
even come to say, "In a sense we were all One Great
Big Author". And yet, he'd also be aware - as they
would be, too - that he was wery different than they. Van
Vogt would believe that his unique approach to writing
science fiction set his work apart and gave his stories a
timeless quality that other SF did not have.

And int is more than possible that he was right about
this.

Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on his grandparents'
farm on April 26, 1912, and raised in a series of small
towns in Saskatchewan and manitoba. His father was a
storekeeper and then a lawyer who became the Western
Canadian agent for a shipping line and moved the family
to Winnipeg when Alfred was in high school.

Van Vogt was a voracious reader who picked science
fiction up for a time as a youngster and then dropped it
after awhile, as many do. He read pulp fiction,
historical novels, mysteries, and westerns, as well as
more serious British and French literature. He read in
history and psychology and phylosophy of science. And he
read many plays including Greek tragedirs.

However, his attempts at studying practical science in
high school were something less than a success. He was
good at overviews adn concepts, but dismal when it came
to remembering exact facts.<p>
And here is his first difference from Campbell's other
major authors; Smith, de Camp, Heinlein and Asimov were
all college postgraduates with training in chemistry,
engineering, and mathematics. But van Vogt never made it
to college. The Depression came along at the time he was
finishing high school, his father lost his job, and
Alfred had to go to work.

He knew that he wanted to be a writer. He took a
writing course by correspondance and read books on
writing from the public library. But mainly he was self
taught.

He wasn't any too successful. For a time, he fell into
writing confession stories. After that wore thin, he
turned out radio scripts and occasional pulp stories. But
he hadn't figured out his proper form. Consequently, he
worked at one job and another, and noodled along at his
story writing.

In the summer of 1938, when van Vogt was 26, he was an
advertising space salesman and writer of interviews for a
chain of half-a-dozen trade magazines which included
Hardware and Metal, Sanitary Engineer, and Canadian
Grocer. And then one day, after years in which he had
read no science fiction whatever, on impulse he picked up
the latest issue of Astounding in a Winnipeg drugstore,
thumbed to the middle pages, and began to read a story.

The story which he chanced upon this way was "Who
Goes There?" by Don A. Stuart. Although it was given
no special emphasis within the magazine, this happened to
be a work of extraordinary significance. It's true author
was John W. Campbell and "Who Goes There?" was
a key example of the modern science fiction he wanted to
publish in his magazine - a model for others to follow.

In this story, a hideous telepathic alien creature is
discovered frozen in the Antaarctic ice. When it is
thawed out, it comes back to life and begins to take over
the men and animals of the expedition and turn them into
extensions of itself. In previous SF, mankind would have
been helpless before this superior alien invader. In
"WHo Goes There?", however, it is the humans
who prevail by keeping their heads, cooperating, and
successfully applying their scientific knowledge to the
challenge that faces them.

Van Vogt was swept away by what he was reading. Not
only did he recognize this story as something different,
he was inspired by it. As soon as he finished "Who
Goes There?" he sat down and wrote a letter to
Astounding outlining an idea for an SF story of his own
and asking the editor if he had any interest in seeing
more. John Campbell wrote back immediatley to encourage
him, and van Vogt was launched into a new career as a
science fiction writer.

His first published SF story was "Black
Destroyer" in the July 1939 Astounding, the issue
which would come to be reckoned the point of departure
for Campbell's Golden Age. This issue also had Asimov's
initial story for Campbell, and the following month's
Astounding would present Heinlein's first story.

But of these debuts, van Vogt's was the most
auspicious. Not only was "Black Destroyer"
pictured on the cover of the magazine, but it would be
recognized as one of the most significant stories
published in Astounding that year.

"Black Destroyer" took the lesson that van
Vogt had learned in reading "Who Goes There?"
and magnified it and extended it. The story concerns an
exploring party of humans froma a galactic civilization
who encounter a powerful and able but decadent and
hostile creature on an isolated planet. This being seeks
to kill them all and seize their spaceship in order to
conquer the galaxy, but they manage to defeat it by
virtue of their greater self-control and breadth of
vision.

This brings us to van Vogt's second major difference
from his fellows. De Camp, Heinlein and Asimov were all
basically satisfied with the nature of humanity as it is
now. The goal as far as these scientifically-trained men
were concerned was to imagine improvements in our state
of knowledge and command, and to envision how human
thought structures and human authority might come to be
imposed upon alternate universes, our future history,
robots, and the galaxy.

Not so with van Vogt. No less than they, he cared
about the welfare of humankind, and he would even come to
say, "Science fiction, as I personally try to write
it, glorifies man and his future". But van Vogt was
not as ready as Campbell's other writers to think that
all that was necessary in order to realize this future
was an improved set of scientific tools. It was van
Vogt's perception that humanity is still ata relatively
early stage in it's development and that if we are going
to become all that we may aspire to be, we will have to
do some growing up and changing. As he would say: "I
don't think that we know yet - in physiological or
psychological terms - what a true human being would look
like".

His approach to this key insight was not simple,
linear, or even rational. Rather, it was holistic,
multiform, and intuitive. Van Vogt would not write one
central set of connected stories like Heinleins Future
History or Asimovs Foundation Series. Instead, He posed
his question - what is it that constitutes true
superiority. real maturity, adn how might humanity arrive
there? - and came at it again and agin from one direction
and then another.

The British philospher and SF visionary Olaf Stapledon
and the American myth scholar Joseph Campbell are in
agreement that true myth is a combination of the best
knowledge pf a particular culture and the highest
aspirations that it can conceive. If, as van Vogt
suggests, the mythmakers of John W. Campbell's Astounding
were One Great Big Author, then it was the likes of
Asimov and Heinlein who supplied the base of fact and
plausible reason, while it was van Vogt who reached the
farthest in vision and inspiration.

This difference between van Vogt and the others may be
seen most clearly in the pictures that they drew - or
didn't draw - of the galactic future of humanity:

L. Sprague de Camp was unable to see any rational
scientific means by which human beings might achieve the
faster-than-light travel necessary for us to explore the
stars, so in his Golden Age stories he left the question
of expansion into the galaxy alone.

Robert Heinlein was able -just one time - to imagine
humans setting forth from his future historical Earth and
traveling among the stars. But when they got there, they
would encounter superior beings of one kind and then
another and be intimidated and scurry back to Earth,
tails between their legs.

Isaac Asimov was more ready than de Camp and Heinlein
to allow mankind a future place among the stars - but it
was only by writing of a galaxy that was devoid of other
intelligent rivals and competitors and rnaking human
social relations and political interactions his focus of
concern.

In contrast to Asimov, Heinlein and de Camp, A.E. van
Vogt would see no problem in placing humanity within the
context of the galaxy as a whole and then measuring us
against whatever we might find there. This meant that in
a story like "Black Destroyer," galactic
humankind might be pitted against a culturally degenerate
but immensely powerful alien being, while in another
story it would be humans who were seen as galactic
provincals. In one series of stories, van Vogt might
picture us as leaders within a stellar federation of many
different races, while in another group of connected
stories he would portray human beings as unrivaled within
this galaxy and venturing forth to explore another in a
greatship in which all the dominant positions are held by
women. But even these examples do not exhaust all the
different galactic possibilities which van Vogt would
imagine.

Even John Campbell would marvel at the range and
audacity of all that van Vogt was able to envision. Years
later, he would say to another writer of van Vogt:
"That son-of-a-gun is about one-half mystic, and
like many another mystic, hits on ideas that are sound,
without having any rational method of arriving at them or
defending them."

Van Vogt himself would not think of what he was doing
in terms of mysticism. That would be a dirty word to him.
But there can be no doubt that his favored working
methods - some derived from his early study in how to
write, some worked out over the years by himself - went
far beyond the bounds of ordinary reason. Along with his
unconventional self-education and his view of the
unfinished nature of our humanity, it is these systems of
story production which constitute the third great
difference between him and his fellow contributors to
Campbell's Golden Age. Let us look at six of these
methods:

1. Van Vogt didn't plan his stories in advance. He
would declare that when he tried to do this, his stories
didn't work and he was never able to sell them. He'd say,
"I have no endings for my stories when I start them
-just a thought and something that excites me. I get some
picture that is very interesting and I write it. But I
don't know where it's going to go next."

2. Van Vogt would write his stories as a series of
short scenes or "presentation units," each of
which had its own immediate purpose. This meant that he
might contradict himself completely or go off in a whole
new direction from one scene to the next - but no matter.

3. He would never hesitate to deliberately use
approximate words or "wrong" words if they were
able to strike a particular tone or resonance which
produced a desired subconscious emotional effect in the
reader.

4. Even though he found it extremely difficult to do,
van Vogt would try to write what he thought of as
"science-fictional sentences." These would have
deliberate gaps or vaguenesses -"hang-ups," as
he called them - for the reader to fill in out of his or
her own imagination. Though this might seem a strange way
ofworking, it is exactly the same technique as the
crucial missing "cutting word" at the heart of
the Japanese haiku.

5. Van Vogt wouldn't hold back anything while he was
at work on a particular story. He made a deliberate point
of tossing in any and every idea that occurred to him
which he could see any way to include.

6. While writing, especially when he got stuck in a
story, van Vogt would program his dreams to carry him
forward. He would set his alarm clock to wake him during
the night, think about his story for a while, and then go
to sleep. When his alarm rang he would lie awake thinking
about the story and it's problems some more until he fell
asleep again, only to be awakened again after another two
hours, and so on through the night. He says
"Generally, either in a dream or about ten o'clock
the next morning - bang! - an idea comes and it will be
something in a sense non-sequitur - yet a growth from the
story. I've gotten my most original stories that way;
these ideas made the story different every ten pages. In
other words, I wouldn't have been able to reason them
out, I feel."

Slan was van Vogt's first novel, written in the
evening and on weekends over a six-month period from the
end of 1939 when van Vogt was employed as a paper pusher
in the Canadian Department of Defence in the early days
of World War II. As a serial in Astounding, Slan was van
Vogt's second great hit and the most popular story
published in the magazine in 1940.

Van Vogt says, "My work has been somewhat
invalidated by critics who are determined to force
mainstream techniques on science fiction; but we'lljust
have to wait and see who wins in the long run. My wager
is on my method of presenting science by way of fictional
sentences, and on the timeless reality that must underlie
the dreaming process, when it is used consistently as I
have done."

The results of his unusual and original mode of
working you will see here in Slan. The story is sometimes
fuzzy, sometimes bewildering, sometimes exasperating -
and yet it is also an undeniably original, provocative,
and even brilliant piece of work.

Take van Vogt as you find him and make the best of him
that you can. Go along where he carries you and enjoy the
roller-coaster ride. Many writers have tried to copy A.E.
van Vogt, but there has never been another SF storyteller
quite like him.